Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

So some background on this space.

This is hardly the first entrant and pretty much every tv and blu-ray you buy moving forward will have similar capabilities to what Google has announced. Though perhaps with a different provider.

Yahoo actually has the most TV's out right now with similar interactivity using their widget platform. They're on Sony, Samsung, Vizio and LG tvs http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/

Samsung has their own platform running on their TVs and blu-ray players. Its an HTML engine and also supports a "Flash Lite" or Stagecraft. (and their tvs still run yahoo widgets as well) http://www.samsung.com/us/internetTV/

Vudu (recently bought by Wal-Mart) has an app platform being supported by many manufacturers as well its Lua based and on Toshiba, LG and Sanyo products. (this is outside of their on-demand video service)

Panasonic has "Viera Cast" which is actually a cloud based service I haven't really figured out yet

So besides these there's quite a few "Over The Top" boxes that provide similar functions such as

Roku

Popcorn Hour (about to launch their new Popbox in a bit)

Apple TV

Boxee

Anyway its fun to see Google hopping into the space we'll see how well they do.

You are right.

Apple TV should have been this product, if it was open and allowed you to browse any website and ran flash, it didn't.

Boxee would be this product if it had shipped a box that worked with the TV. (Yeah, I know about the boxee box). The difference is Google has the muscle to close the loop on this one.

The others are all closed at various levels or lack developer traction.

Boxee is the closest in terms of being open, I was hoping to replace my apple tv (had it from day 1 and use it for my videos and photos)

You can hack the Apple TV and put Boxee on it. The fact that so many people did that should've clued Apple in.

What Google has, that only Yahoo and Microsoft can match, is federated search for video content. Apple should buy a search engine and apply it to search video content.

Google also has the brand clout to take on Microsoft and Apple. Yahoo has less brand power, but it has enough to leverage itself into this market.

Actually I think there's some legs on the dark horse in the race with Vudu. Considerably weaker w/r/t brand awareness, but shelf space in WalMart is pretty precious (Vudu's new parent). I could see Wal-Mart using their considerable clout to get Vudu onto TV's sold in their stores.

Have you tried it? It crashes the Apple Tv about twice a day, I reverted back to the Apple Tv OS.

In that case, Apple gave up an even better opportunity than I thought.

I have read this a few times now about Apple trying to get a low cost TV package for iTunes.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_15121131?IADID=Search-www.merc...

I think until they can pull it off, AppleTV would remain crippled.

I agree. The newer versions of Boxee have been much heavier, and crash or slow down significantly the Apple TV. I had a lot of hope for Boxee on Apple TV with their beta, but it's clear to me that their focus is on selling their boxee box now.

The alphas ran decently on it. Since there is no HD decoder hardware in the Apple TV (there's a minipci card you can apparently buy for like $50 that replaces the minipci wifi card that adds on hardware HD decoding), so you can not watch HD obviously. However, even the interface and regular SD videos are slower than heck on it now.

Apple and Boxee dropped the ball.

What would have been real genius (no pun intended), was if Apple bought Boxee from Avner, -or- they collaborated together for the Apple TV and Apple TV HD.

I'm not holding my breath though. It'll never happen, since their philosophies are so different, and Apple would want the iPhone OS SDK on it, which would require a rewrite of Boxee.

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